CHARLESTON, W.Va.—On a rainy October Saturday, about half a dozen people trudged up a rocky path to witness what coal companies had done to Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. For generations, locals had gathered to pray on this high ground, and three towering white crosses marked the site. The surrounding woods showed off their early fall color, but not far beyond them was a vast, gray bulldozed moonscape left by mountaintop-removal coal mining.

For the last two decades, coal companies in Appalachia have used high explosives to blast open mountains, expose the coal seams and push the rubble into adjacent valleys. Mountaintop removal is faster and cheaper than tunneling underground for coal, and the struggling coal industry says it’s a vital source of jobs and much-needed energy. Opponents say the practice not only despoils nature, but also poisons the air and water of nearby communities.

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The Kayford Mountain visitors largely came from out of state, invited to West Virginia by Allen Johnson, 67, who co-founded the anti-mountaintop mining group that has been fighting the practice in West Virginia for the past decade. Most in the small group were committed environmentalists, some having spent years fighting for causes like clean water and clean energy. They had something else in common: They were conservative evangelicals.

Johnson’s group is called Christians for the Mountains. His friend, and cohost of the gathering, John Murdock, 42, is a former Interior Department lawyer and writer, who carries business cards that read “Christian. Conservative. Treehugger.” Wearing a red flannel shirt, with a windblown nose and cheeks peeking out above his white beard, Johnson told the visitors about his old friend, Larry Gibson, a local environmental icon, who had lived and died on Kayford and was buried just up the road. Gibson started organizing to stop mountaintop-removal mining in the 1990s; he refused to sell his 50 acres to the coal companies, despite the attempts to intimidate him—coal trucks ran him off the road, drunken miners came on his property shouting obscenities and threats, vandals burned down his cabin and shot his dog.

In the hyper-partisan world of American climate politics, these guys are a minority within a minority—evangelical environmentalists who are deeply conservative. Christian environmentalism has been making some headlines recently, not least over the summer when Pope Francis connected climate with social justice in his encyclical, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, and spoke again on those themes during his September visit to America. In the run-up to the international climate talks in Paris, advocates for bold action on global warming embraced the encyclical.

The shorthand for faith-based environmentalism is “creation care”—the notion that people have been entrusted by God to care for the Earth. But the common perception is that creation care was a concern of liberal congregations, ones far more concerned with social justice talk than fire and brimstone. Murdock and Johnson, however, are among a growing group of conservative Christians who draw bright moral lines, know their Bibles, and make connections between the environment and other social issues such as their opposition to abortion. Rather than joining the liberal ranks, they want to revive a heritage of belief they trace to the founders of the modern religious right.

Larry Gibson's cabin on Kayford Mountain. | Chris Berdik

Building on the work of believers overseas, a small but steady drumbeat of environmentalism has begun among America’s conservative Christians. A number of conservative churches have invited climate scientists to speak to their congregations, and others are making sustainable development part of their international missionary work. Polls of American evangelicals, particularly the younger ones, show increasing numbers of them believe that the planet is warming and the people are the cause.

If there’s a chance at bridging the gap in this polarizing issue, it could start here, in small gatherings like the one on Kayford Mountain. Faith has a long history of changing minds and pushing broad social change. And in America, the most potent nexus of faith and political power remains with the Christian right. The weaving together of religion and the environment could be one of the most important factors in how America and the world respond to whatever climate commitments are agreed to this week in Paris.

The battle lines have been drawn—many Christian conservatives don’t simply ignore the “creation care” movement, they denounce it. In recent years, Christian pastors and theologians have actively organized against environmentalism, releasing books and DVDs warning that creation care is a Trojan Horse from the left meant to subvert Christianity with nature worship.

At the same time, it’s not certain how easily secular environmentalists and conservative creation care advocates will mix. A growing voice for environmental action among the faithful doesn’t mean they will suddenly flock to the Sierra Club. The likes of Murdock and Johnson believe pollution is symptomatic of a broken, sinful society that has lost its way—and, for the same reason, they oppose abortion and gay marriage. Their environmentalism is a testament and an act of faith, a call to repent and restore a broken covenant with God, and to spread the Gospel. To them, conservative Christian environmentalism is deeply consistent and global in its ambition—the question is whether it can become consistent with anything else in America.

“All of nature wants Christians to act like Christians,” Murdock said in an interview some weeks after the Kayford Mountain visit, citing scripture:

The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

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If you trace the origins of the modern Christian right, you don’t have to look too hard for an environmentalist thread. Among the leaders who forged conservative Christians into a united, politically engaged movement in the 1970s and early 1980s, few were as influential as the fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher and theologian Francis Schaeffer. In lecture tours and books, such as A Christian Manifesto, and films such as Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Schaeffer urged believers to take worship beyond the church walls, to engage with the world and to combat what he deemed the evils of “secular humanism,” notably abortion.

He was also very concerned about the planet. In a less well-known book, Pollution and the Death of Man (1970), Schaeffer linked environmental stewardship with respecting life in its totality. “The two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment—money and time,” Schaeffer wrote, “or to say it another way, greed and haste.”

Schaeffer argued that the hippies of the day were right to fight America’s “plastic culture,” but misguided in their approach to faith, turning toward what he considered a pantheism that valued human beings “no more than grass.” Instead, Schaeffer said our call to care for the environment was a testament to the special place people occupy in God’s plan.

“There is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man, but of all creation,” he wrote. “The Christian who believes in the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.”

God is saying, come on, I will show you. I want to restore Eden’s lost dreams. Come, walk with me. Jesus Christ didn’t just redeem our souls on the cross, but the whole of creation. “

In the decades that followed, however, the Christian right did not take up Schaeffer’s environmentalism with anywhere near the enthusiasm that they did his pro-life stance. Murdock thinks there were several reasons for this. For one thing, evangelicals were appalled by certain environmentalist precepts at the time, especially “zero population growth,” which ran counter to the Christian push to be fruitful and multiply and raised the specter of abortion and forced population control.

But politics played a big role, too, according to Murdock. A few years after Roe v. Wade, the Republicans engineered a strategy in the 1970s to peel religious voters away from born-again Democrat Jimmy Carter by adding a pro-life plank to their national platform. Environmentalists, for the most part, decided to go “all in” with the Democrats by the mid 1980s after Ronald Reagan sided with western landowners in their “sagebrush rebellion” against federal regulations.

As the partisan alliances hardened over the decades, conservative Christians and environmentalists increasingly viewed one another as enemies. According to sociologist Lydia Bean, senior consultant for the faith-based community organizers PICO National Network and author of The Politics of Evangelical Identity (2014), the religious self-concept of American evangelicals became “so closely intertwined with partisanship” that anything championed by Democrats, including environmentalism, was implicitly yoked to secular humanism and therefore threatened Christianity.